“You human in there?”
“I said, ‘no offence.’”
“None taken. I’m just curious.”
“Well, don’t be.”
“There must be something biological, or else you wouldn’t be in this place, messing with your chemistry.”
“It’s certainly not for the company.”
“Hey, you spoke to me, remember?”
The suit shifted with a faint whirr of servos, presenting its back. There, embossed against the silver, was the logo of the Earth Justice Enforcement Agency, and her surname in black: Ei.
“Nice to meet you, soldier,” she said.
Maybe I really was that obvious. Stung, I retreated to contemplate my empty shot glass.
“Don’t mind her,” said the bartender, a loathsome toad but at least superficially of my species. “She’s spoiling for a fight with someone her size, and you don’t really qualify.”
“Gee, thanks.” I was sarcastic, but that was one thing to be grateful for. In my current form, Enforcer Ei could have squashed me like a bug. “What’s her story? I don’t recognize the make of her suit.”
“Something new, I guess. She’s been here three months. Came after a mark. Caught him almost immediately, they say. He snuck in through the Infall, and she tracked him down. First the Authorities knew of him was when she handed them his body.”
I’d been debriefed on arrival, but there was still so much to learn. “The Authorities?”
“Closest thing to a government you’ll find in Harvester.”
“Maybe I should take a proper look about the place, see what’s what. While I can still walk.”
The bartender gave me half a shot, on the house.
“For the road?”
“There’s no road from here, my friend. Just ways to pass the time.”
Five suns, any one of which was in the sky at any given time. One planetary nebula, casting a permanent glow across the heavens. Permanent settlements scattered across two rocky worlds, plus stations around the system’s only gas giant. The gas giant was home to the shipyards.
That’s where I went first, in a manner of speaking.
Tideships, stillships, heavyships…every species had its own wild fantasy about getting home the hard way. None of them had worked to date, and even if one did, where would it go? The nebula was almost a light-year across. Just getting a clear picture of the universe outside was difficult. No one had a map, and if they did we weren’t on it.
“The colony at loop junction one-sixty-three has many names,” said the orientation drone taking me and my fellow newbs on the virtual tour. “‘Cyernus’ is the oldest known, but almost certainly not the first. The term comes from the Guta tongue, and approximately translates as ‘harvester,’ the epithet employed by the colony’s human inhabitants.”
Our point of view swept through the ribs of a ship so big it would take another century just to finish the chassis.
“Harvester is home to seventeen species of biological sentient and three machine intelligences. Evidence of habitation stretches back more than one million years, with only two vacant periods, the longest spanning ten thousand years. Fossil records indicate that life did not evolve here. Presumably the Loop’s builders were the first inhabitants.”
That told me a little, but not a lot. All things in Harvester started and ended with the Loop, which remained as mysterious as ever.
“Why this junction?” asked someone from the back of the consensual shuttle. “Why did it break down here?”
“That is unknown. The malfunction remains unexplained, if indeed it is a malfunction. Some maintain that the Loop was always intended to stop here, and is functioning normally.”
“Perhaps this is the home system of the Builders,” said another shell-shocked newb.
“All roads lead to Rome?” I said. “But there’s only one road, and the Builders are conspicuously absent.”
“Perhaps the event that caused the nebula wiped them out.”
The drone didn’t dignify that with a response. No species capable of building a wormcaster network spanning the universe would ever let a simple stellar hiccup knock them out of the picture.
“One hundred and sixty-three is the largest Heegner number,” said a third member of my temporary compatriots. “That might mean something.”
Also doubtful, I thought. Class number problems and almost integers seemed a long way from the seething polyglot around us. As well as the five suns, two rocky worlds and one gas giant, there were streams of asteroids and dust following fiendishly complex orbits through the system. The largest asteroid had been mined out millennia ago. Wars had once been fought over the richest finds, but things were quiet at the moment, while the Authorities’ power held.
For the foreseeable future, then, I was out of a job.
“I think it’s beautiful,” said a small, dark-haired woman I had barely glanced at before. “It’s so rich and interesting—compared to the other junctions, I mean.”
I looked at her properly, now. We had passed each other at the Outfall on junction one-sixty-two, and then again at Harvester’s Infall. Travelers in the same direction, we had had nothing more in common than that.
Now, we were caught in the same trap, and her eyes were shining with something that might actually have been joy.
“What about the singularity kites of forty-five?” asked another passenger.
“Or the multiplex quintuple system of sixty-one?”
Both good suggestions, I thought, to which I would have added the bottomless pit of thirty-nine, the eternally burning world of eighteen, and the stellar graveyard at even one hundred.
“Sideshows,” she said with a wave of one delicate hand. Her expression was rapturous. “This is the real deal.”
We had all seen the same things. We’d all come to junction one-sixty-three the same way, junction after junction on our intergalactic grand tour. But somehow this woman had arrived at an entirely different place from the rest of us.
“It’s hardwired,” she explained after the tour, at a different Harvester bar, one that stank of yeast and sugar like we were inside a giant brewery. “I don’t believe in being negative, so I make sure I can’t, surgically. I’m only capable of feeling positive emotions—and it’s wonderful.”
“Yes, but you would say that, wouldn’t you?”
She laughed, and invited me back to her place. I was amazed that she already had quarters organized and furnished. While I had been moping about, grousing at strangers, she had been getting her life together.
Maybe, I thought, there was something to her positivity jag. It could even be infectious.
Her name was Zuzi. She didn’t give me anything more than that. And when I told her what I had done for a living, she didn’t ask for details.
“So you’re Corps,” she said. “So what? It’s all history now, Alex.”
She used my name like she used the rest of me. And when she was done, neither of us seemed any happier than we had been before.
I wasn’t the only Corps recruit on Harvester. Embodiment training was mandatory, and the rest of me wasn’t the first to opt for the Loop’s one-way trip. It was a fair bet that some version of my higher self would be around to pick me up when I reached the far end, full to the brim with experiences and memories for the rest of me to share. That no one had ever gone all the way around yet wasn’t a disincentive. It was assumed that the Loop was so big there simply hadn’t been time. No one seriously considered the possibility that one of its links might be broken.
As with most colonies, Corps recruits were called corpses, but here that had both a literal and cautionary edge. Some of us did choose death over being isolated from our higher selves. It wasn’t that our much-reduced forms weren’t viable. It was the thought that this was all we would ever be that did the damage. There were self-help groups, where we talked through our problems. There were training sessions to keep up our skills. There were even a couple of odd little collectives
where mismatched corpses tried to link up and form a new emergent self. I stayed away from the first and last, but forced myself to participate in the second.
Other classes of being occasionally joined the fights. Enforcer Ei was one of them. She was hard to miss. There were other suits and larger bipeds prowling the habitats of Harvester, but none as brooding and dagger-sharp as she was. After that first encounter in the End of the Line, I had seen her in green zones, amphitheatre audiences, work crews, and even just standing around, staring at the view from one of Harvester’s many lookouts. If she lived anywhere in particular, I never found out.
The first time she came to the dojo I frequented, I didn’t fight her, nor the second time. I simply watched her wipe the floor with the toughest members of the crew, one after the other. I noted her moves and catalogued her weaknesses. She was all former, none of the latter.
“Stone cold killer,” said one of the other recruits in an aside she probably couldn’t hear, and if she had, might have taken for a compliment. “I heard rumors of squads like these before I left home. You cross them, you’re dead, no matter how far you run. Remember that guy she killed? Probably thought he’d got clean away, coming out here.…”
I just kept watching, awaiting my opportunity.
The dojo was kitted out with all sorts of tech, but I preferred to fight as close to bare-handed as was feasible. I certainly never fought with a mech suit. Enforcer Ei had seen me sparring and knew my style probably as well as I knew hers, so when I approached her her immediate response was, “You don’t want to fight me.”
“Why challenge you, then?”
“I don’t know. Because you want me to kill you?”
“You won’t kill me. You’re an Enforcer. It wouldn’t be legal.”
“Earth is a long way from here, soldier.”
“Use my name.”
“I don’t know your name.”
“Yes, you do. It was in the news feed.”
She tilted her shining helm. “Alex Lombard. What difference does it make?”
“Maybe none. Maybe a lot if the thought of killing me does cross your mind.”
A small crowd gathered as we squared off in the arena. I ignored the odd mocking cat-call. None came from my fellow recruits. They understood, but they thought I was mad all the same.
I adopted a wary crouch—one she imitated with a whole lot more unfolding of weapon-stalks, fins, and antennae.
“Now you’re just showing off,” I said, noting the position of everything vulnerable.
“And you’re just wasting time.”
“Me? I’m waiting for y—”
I barely registered the sharp clicks of her actuators pushing with explosive force against the arena floor. The next thing I knew I was on my back, in so much pain I could barely breathe.
I blinked up at the shining figure standing over me.
“Enough?” she said.
“Hell, no. They make us tough in the Corps.” That was the truth. I had little conscious control over my body’s more advanced abilities, but already the pain was fading and I was able to get to my feet.
“Again,” I said.
She stepped back. “You can’t be serious.”
“I can’t believe we’re still talking.”
I ducked low under the natural reach of her left arm and lunged for a particular attenuated sensor that looked like it might bend. I didn’t try a kick at her knees. I didn’t for a second consider that I could knock her off-balance. All I saw was the needle-thin tip of that sensor and—in my mind’s eye—my fist reaching out for it, closing tight around it, twisting.…
In reality, I probably got no closer than ten centimeters.
She held me upside-down by one leg so we were almost eye-to-eye. This time there was a little laughter.
“Are you done yet?” she asked.
“If it’s a fair fight you’re looking for—”
“Just getting bored.”
“So come out of the suit and meet me face to face.”
She let go and I hit the floor with all of the habitat’s 1.2-gravities.
“I guess that’s a no.”
“You guessed right.”
She had already turned away. This time I took a running jump for her back, reaching for the panels behind which all her sensors and weapons had retracted. There was sufficient grip there for me to hold onto, and I was able to get to her shoulders before she spun around her center of gravity and punched me hard in the chest.
I was out cold when I hit the dojo wall, and only came to when she shocked me with the tip of an electrical weapon protruding from her mechanical toe.
“Wake up.”
“I’m awake.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Try to understand,” I said braving the hammering in my head in order to sit up. The walls, floor, and ceiling turned dizzyingly around me. “I don’t have a death wish and I’m not expecting to beat you. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about the fight.”
“It’s not even a fight,” she said.
“But it’s a fight I’ve never had before, with an opponent I’ve never fought before. That’s the point.”
She straightened, and I knew I’d reached her. “You think your higher self will be grateful for your memories of being pounded over and over again?”
“Maybe not, if that’s all you’ve got to offer.”
“What else is there?”
“Show me.”
“But you’re so slow,” she said, “so primitive.”
“That’s the point of legacy genes. My higher self—”
“I know what your higher self thinks. It thinks that by making parts of itself old-style human, it’ll stay at least partly human rather than evolve off into some freak-show. That’s why you won’t wear a suit. Another version of you back home is doing that and recording that experience. You’re the grand tourist, the Looper—but you’re still a soldier, or part of one, and you think this is what the rest of you wants. Are you sure you aren’t kidding yourself?”
“Maybe,” I said, “but it beats sitting around in bars.”
She towered over me, unmoving for a good ten seconds.
“All right,” she said. “Get up.”
I did as I was told.
“My higher self is a ‘him,’ not an ‘it,’ by the way.”
“You think ordinary pronouns apply anymore?” She killed that line of conversation with one savage chop of her right battle glove. “Do you know what the craziest thing about you is?”
“What?”
“You haven’t given in. You still think you might go home.”
“Why not? Or I might meet myself out here, wherever we are. Either way.”
She hit me so hard I was in rehab for a week.
When I recovered, she started teaching me about suits like hers—their weak points, their blind spots, their limitations. It was all relative, of course. I never had a hope of putting her down, but she got that now, and it became about something other than winning for her, too.
As we fought, we talked.
“How did you know I was Corps?” I asked during our first spar after rehab. “That wasn’t in the news feed.”
“A lucky guess,” she said.
“No, tell me. What gave it away?”
“You want me to say it was your confidence, or the way you held yourself—meronymically, if that’s a thing.”
“I just want you to tell me the truth.”
She shrugged. “Your biochemistry was off. That’s all.”
“You can tell that at a glance?”
“I can tell what you had for breakfast…yesterday.”
I laughed. “Well, that’s not fair. I don’t get to see anything about you.”
She didn’t answer.
We sparred for a while, and then I pressed her again.
“Seriously, do you ever take your suit off?”
“That’s none of your business, soldier.”
“I’
m making it my business.”
She jabbed at me a fraction faster than I could dodge. I rode out the blow and came up grinning.
“So tell me about this place instead. What’s the deal with the Outfall? Why hasn’t anyone fixed it yet?”
“Do I look like a scientist?”
“I don’t know what you look like, Enforcer Ei. I don’t even know if you have a first name.”
She didn’t respond to that little dig, either. “The Outfall doesn’t work. That’s all you need to know.”
“Doesn’t work how?”
“People walk into it. They stand around looking embarrassed. Then they walk back out again. No one goes anywhere.”
“I presume someone’s examined it.”
“I think we can be sure of that.”
I thought of the brightly glowing sky and the crowded habitats, the tens of thousands of years of devolution and fruitless industry and cultural mixing. People arrived every day, but they were far outnumbered by the people who already lived here, had even been born here.
“Yes, but can we be sure of that?” I asked. “I bet you haven’t looked at it, and neither have I. What if everyone before us did the same—and everyone before them, too? What if that goes right back to the first people here and no one has double-checked the original diagnosis?”
“Why don’t you take the tour and find out for yourself?”
“There’s a tour?”
“Will you stop talking like this if there is?”
I considered the consequences of not taking the hint. She was sensitive on the subject. I had had plenty of time to ponder that during my week in rehab.
“I will,” I said, “if you go with me.”
“On the tour?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re such good company, that’s why.”
That came out a little sharper than I’d intended. Her movements lost some of their smooth grace, like I had managed to hit her where it counted, inside the suit. I dodged two blows with ease, and was beginning to wonder if I had seriously offended her when she said, “All right.”
“All right what?”
“I’ll take the tour with you.”
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